too near to touch
by Kairos27
Summary: She's always had problems with punctuation.  Brittany S. Pierce reads poetry. A mostly incoherent piece.


_The poem is "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" by e.e. cummings._

Punctuation is one of the things Brittany has a problem with; and not because she sometimes mistakes it for being late. And yeah, she has a problem with being late, although it's not because she wants to be late. She just forgets things, sometimes.

But anyway. Punctuation.

The thin volume of e.e. cummings lies open in her lap as she reads and wonders if he ever got 'See Me' written on his book reports for not capitalizing properly and using the wrong punctuation. Brittany thinks that they would have been friends. But, like, they can't really be friends because e.e. is totally dead. Which sucks a lot. And Mrs. Williams still marks her down. "I appreciate your newfound inclination for freeform poetry, but this isn't poetry class, Brittany."

_**!**_ Brittany scrawls an invisible exclamation mark with her finger. Mrs. Williams keeps saying she uses them improperly. As if dots and commas are any way to express how she really feels, and she's not allowed to use emoticons either.

Wait. Would e.e. cummings have used emoticons? Did those even exist back then?

Well. Maybe if e.e. weren't dead, she would ask. And he would tell her how he, like, became a famous poet without having to bother with punctuation and capitalization. How he never had to bother about what people thought.

And then she'd be able to tell Santana how.

But all her not-friend e.e. has left her is this book. Brittany flips the page.

**_somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond_**

**_any experience,your eyes have their silence:_**

**_in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,_**

**_or which i cannot touch because they are too near_**

Santana is frail and Brittany finds herself locked inside her heart, with the reality that no one sees it but Brittany herself. The closer she gets, the farther away Santana feels when she tries to touch.

Brittany has the key to the door; she could leave if she wants. But why would she? She wouldn't have started on this road if she didn't believe that one day, Santana will take the key from her and open the door herself. She's never believed in anything more strongly. With exclamation marks, if she could:_** ive never believed in anything more strongly!**_

**_your slightest look easily will unclose me_**

**_though i have closed myself as fingers,_**

**_you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens_**

**_(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose_**

She'd said their relationship was confusing her. She looked deep into a welling fear and said, simply, _Santana_.

Santana came unclosed.

They went to Miss Holliday.

Easy as that.

She'd come around.

**_or if your wish be to close me, i and_**

**_my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,_**

**_as when the heart of this flower imagines_**

**_the snow carefully everywhere descending;_**

Handling the seasons of her life really is hard, especially when they change. That's probably why reading calendars doesn't come naturally to Brittany.

And to think that there are harder things.

Brittany's hand trembles with the weight of Santana's heart. When she'd handed it over, it was open. It closed in heavily on itself when she stormed away, Artie in between.

**_nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals_**

**_the power of your intense fragility:whose texture_**

**_compels me with the color of its countries,_**

**_rendering death and forever with each breathing_**

Mrs. Williams would say that _I can't_ and _I'm trying_ are not the same thing, but eggs can be breakfast and dinner. That's who Santana is, two steps minus one step equals one step, and one step is better than zero steps. Zero is something Brittany never wants to think about because, well, Brittany sucks at math.

And also because zero would mean that Santana didn't really mean it when she said _I want to be with you_.

No, she meant it. _I love you like never before_ even though Brittany knows how deeply she wounded Santana by refusing to leave Artie. Grammar, like punctuation, isn't Brittany's strong suit according to Mrs. Williams, but she's pretty sure that 'like never before' means that the after was different from the before. Before was when everything was confusing. After is… well, they're trying to figure it out, because after is much longer, longer and stronger, and scarier than before.

**_(i do not know what it is about you that closes_**

**_and opens;only something in me understands_**

**_the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)_**

**_nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands_**

Soulmates, Santana had said. Brittany knows there's absolutely no way she was talking about Karofsky back then. If she had, she wouldn't have looked away from Jacob. Because Santana always looks away when she lies to somebody. Brittany hates the look in Santana's eyes, the look she gets when she realizes that she's screwed up. Brittany doesn't like getting hurt (who does?) but Santana hurts herself when she hurts Brittany, and a hurting Santana hurts Brittany the most.

She hated the look, but she held Santana's gaze anyway until she turned and fled.

_she pries at her heart locker with her bare bleeding hands(could she just ask brittany for the_

_key the only locker combo that _

_brittany will never forget,but the one _

_santana forgets all too easily _

_when brittany is_

_looking at _

_her)_


End file.
